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I have a guy in India that link builds for me, I pay him for posting the link and pay him again on proof of success, so he has to show me the linking page.

it is hard to check as you suggest because links some times take a long time to be approved, and it is time consuming checking sites to see where they put your links. Even if there is software to do this, you may have to wait some time before checking.Take the work off your hands and pay them on success is my advice

Using Open Site Explorer offered by SEOMOZ is propbably your best bet.

Open Site Explorer:

Research and compare backlinks with competitors for intelligent and targeted link building. Identify top pages, view social activity data, and analyze anchor text.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

You can also maybe have a look at Majestic SEO who also offer some great link building information, with regards to how many links you have, anchor text information and they update their data regularly.

We too use link builders in India to build links for us across 60+ terms for various clients and managing them is a nightmare.

We recently embarked on a project with our developers to create a Link Management system. The system allows a link builder to log in and 'Post' a link, which is then crawled and checked a number of times over the coming weeks. New links that are found are then confirmed and reports can be produced by client/link builder to show how many new links have been established, thus how many we should pay for. We also linked into SEOmoz API to grab the URLs PA/DA scores so we can monitor quality.

Our clients can also log in and monitor their link campaign progress, which saves use a time consuming report at the end of each month.

My favourite part is the Link Atrophy report which highlights links that have dropped off/disappeared since the last crawl. It gives me an error code for each link to say why the link wasn't found, such as 404 for the linking page is gone, 500 for server error and others for the link just isn't active anymore.

Its proving very useful and a fantastic time saving tool. Not bad for a weeks worth of dev time.

Your Link Management system sounds nice. It is a custom solution? If so, you may want to work with your development team to consider publishing it on the market. There is a ton more work involved but it may be worthwhile.

With respect to your link builders in India, what kind of sites are they gaining links from? Are they trolling forums and blogs? Free directories? Or are they gaining unique links from credible sites which are related to your niche?

I have a simular system, but not so automated, the idea of logging into SEOMoz sounds good, mine is a cross section of customers and submission sites, I have scoring criteria for each site, so if the site is not paying its way I drop it instead of mindless submitting to sites regardless. As I mentioned I pay for submissions and success, so I don’t have a problem of finding the successful links, my man in India does that to get paid. But I like the idea of checking they still exist into the future. One of the main advantages is the data you get back, knowing the success rate, what link text was used, deep links, niche link count per page, link position we then can submit in order of quality, niche and locality. Or at lest that’s the plan I have only been up and running a few months and still redesigning as needed. I built mine on ASP.MVC, SQL , it stated out to be a simple app, but has now grown quite complicated.

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